Nicole Sealey's Organic & Instinctive Ordinary Beast

Christopher Richards reviews Nicole Sealey's first collection of poems, Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017) for 4Columns. "Despite being early in her career, Sealey bears the grace of a writer with full command over her gifts, a command that is thrillingly at odds with the out-of-joint universe of her poetry," writes Richards. More from this review:

In one of Sealey’s most arresting poems, “candelabra with heads,” her speaker views a Thomas Hirschhorn sculpture and conjures the lurid scene of a lynching. In restless lines of self-examination, she thinks, “Had I not brought with me my mind / as it has been made, this thing, / . . . might be eight infants swaddled” or “eight fleshy fingers on one hand.” She understands that seeing takes part as much in the brain as it does in the eye—we adapt what we see into what our minds have come to expect, and here a sculpture of humanoid shapes mounted on a wooden scaffold with packing tape forms itself into a distinct scene of horror. 

The poem is an obverse, a formal innovation invented by Sealey whereby the poem’s first half is repeated in reverse order in the second half of the poem (the fourteenth line repeats as the fifteenth line, the thirteenth line repeats as the sixteenth line, and so on). In “candelabra with heads” these reversals create new, frightening juxtapositions in thought, the structure of the poem escalating the obsessive dread. But rather than ending the poem with its first line—as the form would lead the reader to anticipate—Sealey subverts our expectation and concludes with a new line that is the poem’s thesis: “Who can see this and not see lynchings?” Formal structures—including sonnets, sestinas, a cento, an erasure, standard rhyme schemes—are employed throughout Ordinary Beast, and Sealey’s playful use of them is organic and instinctive... 

Find the full review of Ordinary Beast at 4Columns.